Rebels Unraveling

This is not the Confederacy as imagined by secessionists or mythologized by white supremacists but the Confederacy as it really was--a rapacious state unraveling from the beginning. The imagined Confederacy was a projection of enslavers' ideology, a united South in which all, free and enslaved, would sacrifice everything upon the altar of Confederate nationalism. Blessed by God, the enslavers believed their cause a just and holy one on behalf of 'liberty' and 'independence' in the face of Yankee aggression and the Lincoln administration's existential threat to their way of life. Most of this was a lie: White Southerners were deprived of no liberties in the Union, apart from the presumed right to expand slavery indefinitely; the Confederacy stood for no liberties, especially among its large, enslaved population. The rest was a delusion: Secession would not unite Confederate society but expose its mortal rifts. Offering a political, military, and social history of the Confederacy, Rebels Unraveling demonstrates how the putative nation began unraveling soon after its formation from pressures within and without. Centering on the tension between the Civil War's promise of release and the coercion necessary to its prosecution, the book chronicles the Confederacy's increased bullying of its own citizens until the collective identity that underlay Confederate nationalism splintered. The narrative immerses readers in the feelings and reactions of all who lived under the Confederate regime--common and elite white people as well as the enslaved--as the war unfolds to its inevitable denouement. In so doing, Rebels Unraveling upends the grand narrative that emphasizes the undying devotion of Southern white people to the Confederate cause and offers a powerful corrective to a myth with lasting implications for US history to the present day.

William L. Barney (1943-2025) was Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War (OUP, 2011); The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir's Civil War (OUP, 2007); and Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy (OUP, 2020), among other titles.